1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to printing format display equipment for displaying image data that is intended to be printed and that contains different parts with varying printing formats.
2. Description of the Prior Art
The advancement of computer-aided desk top publishing (hereinafter referred to as DTP) in recent years now allows users to create complex documents combining various types of visual data, including photographic images, business graphics such as charts and graphs, and expanded or shrunken text.
However, when color correction is performed on color output sent to the printer in order to accurately print a color image and retain the same printing formats (or printing properties) as set in the document, the printing formats output are sometimes faded in comparison to the graphics in the document, and the graphics lose some of their impact. Sometimes the life-like appearance of photographic images is lost when performing color correction on highly saturated, vivid colors sent to the printer.
Towards this problem, recent achievements have been made that allow different parts of the same document to be appropriately expressed by setting the printing formats for each part of the image data. A technology has been proposed (Japanese Laid-Open Patent Publication HEI-7-236066) In which the printing formats can be set manually for each part of the document, or printing formats appropriate for each part of a document can be set automatically through a computer process.
A reliable way to check the printing condition of data set in the manner described above is to print the document out, but this trial-and-error method of verification can be a waste of printing time, paper, ink, and the like. To avoid this waste, users display their documents on a CRT or similar type display and verify the printing conditions on the screen before actually printing the document. However, CRT displays use an additive color mixing process, while printers use a subtractive color mixing process, making it impossible to accurately verify the printing conditions in this way.
Although users might be certain of printing conditions for image data set entirely by themselves, much of the image data is set by people other than the user. Furthermore, when settings are made automatically by a computer as described above, no one knows what settings have been made, potentially leading to further misunderstanding.
In DTP, multiple image data is created using various software programs and then combined to create one document.
However, if the user does not understand or forgets what printing settings have been made when creating a document, he or she cannot accurately verify the printing settings, even if it was the user who set the printing formats.